The role of women in society is an issue that has been debated for a very long time. Over the years, the status of women in development projects has suffered numerous transformations. Despite the progress that the human society has achieved in the last hundreds of years, in certain countries women still have a controversial role in development. In order to be able to progress and build a strong future it is essential for all nations to acknowledge the role that women play in progress projects.
Women in Development is an approach that was defined in the 70s in conjunction with several developmental projects that were aimed at improving the status of women in various economical fields. After a while the Gender and Development approach realized that it is impossible to treat the women’s issues isolated from external factors therefore they started to study these problems in association with gender relation issues. However, in time the GAD approach started to be criticized as their theories and activities were only highlighting the differences between women and men without analyzing and trying to improve gender relations and the potential to change the reasoning between role assignment.
In the 1980s the United Nations noticed a lot of issues on the Women in Development approaches. It was observed that while they were certain self improvement projects for women, they were merely focused towards home economics. The United Nations wanted to change that approach and channel the WID efforts towards more productive and income generating activities. According to an analytical framework developed by Harvard, it made a lot more sense to allocate resources to both men and women in order to encourage development in certain fields of interest. The efficiency approach has had a lot of positive impacts in the USA but progress must be encouraged all over the world in order to build a strong future based on constant progress. There has been a lot more attention paid to women’s rights in the Democratic Party history than where the Republican Party is concerned, but this is explained partially through the fact that the latter is associated with conservationism, and with keeping things as they were. This is why in the Democratic Party history, there have been a lot more women members, and there is still a higher ratio of women interested in joining or adhering to this party and its political views.
The role that women play in development is different in most countries. The main enemy of progress in gender relation is tradition. It is very hard to change the mentality of a nation and fight with prejudice. However, numerous countries have managed to obtain positive results. When it comes to combining tradition with progress, Japan is the best example. On the issue of WID, Japan has tried to implement projects that offer assistance and encourage women to get involved in development from very early ages. Furthermore equal attention is dedicated to rural and urban areas. For example in rural areas they try to improve the water supply and drainage problems in order to relieve women from certain daily chores so that they can have more time for personal development.
